April 30, 2025 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the American War in Vietnam. The war lasted twenty years and led to the deaths of an estimated 3 million people. After the end of the war, a huge wave of refugees fled Vietnam. Some of them settled in and around Portland. Today the city is home to one of the largest Vietnamese communities in the United States, making up 2 percent of the population.
Kevin Truong’s family was part of that wave of refugees who settled in Oregon. This year, as an Oregon Humanities Community Storytelling Fellow, he’s sharing some of the stories about the Vietnamese diaspora in Portland and neighboring communities.
In this video, we hear from Allen Đức Lương, who fled Vietnam with his family in 1975 after the Fall of Saigon. They ended up in Portland, where his family opened one of the first Vietnamese grocery stores in the city. Today he is the founder of the Vietnamese Cultural Arts Alliance and the guardian of an over one-hundred-year-old family temple at his art gallery in Tigard.
Kevin Truong is a 2025 Oregon Humanities Community Storytelling Fellow. Kevin is a Sundance-supported artist whose work spans photography, journalism, and filmmaking and is often centered around the queer and immigrant experiences. As a filmmaker, he has received fellowships from both the Center for Asian American Media and BAVC Media, and his work has received support and funding from the Sundance Institute, MacArthur Foundation, California Film Institute, RAAC, and the Portland Events and Film Office, among others. As a journalist, Kevin has written stories for NBC News and VICE and has worked as a producer with Student Reporting Labs at the PBS NewsHour, where he helped produce and film a series of short documentaries on misinformation. He is currently working on his first feature length film, a documentary about his mom called Mai American.
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